Hyon Song-wol, a singer, rumoured to be a former lover of the North Korean leader, is said to have been arrested on Aug 17 with 11 others for violating laws against pornography.

All 12 were machine-gunned three days later, with other members of North Korea's most famous pop groups and their immediate families forced to watch. The onlookers were then sent to prison camps, victims of the regime's assumption of guilt by association, the reports stated.

Kim Jong-un's ex-lover 'executed by firing squad' - Telegraph

By George Friedman, Founder and Chairman of Stratfor, a geopolitical intelligence firm

Obama's Syria Bluff Has Been Called - Forbes

I think Gen. Alexander believes that history is made by great individuals standing against evil.  I believe that brave people can make a difference, but that larger inexorable forces are often more important: history, economics, political and social systems, the environment. So I believe that power corrupts and that good people will do bad things when a system is poorly designed, no matter how well-intentioned they may be.

My Dinner With NSA Director Keith Alexander - Forbes

For the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City, officials say, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and NSA arranged with Qwest Communications International Inc. to use intercept equipment for a period of less than six months around the time of the event. It monitored the content of all email and text communications in the Salt Lake City area.

Thats got to be a mis statement.

New Details Show Broader NSA Surveillance Reach - WSJ.com

The authorities who detained Miranda do not understand why that is outrageous and probably underestimated the consequences of doing it.

The IC simply does not think that there are legitimate questions about either the legality of the programs that Snowden has revealed or the policy framework in which they operate. Furthermore, all of the professional political message men who write opinion pieces in various papers have been smearing Snowden and deflecting the discussion away from the policy questions for months. That is traditionally how issues like this have been managed in Washington and Washington expects those traditional mechanisms to work.

In other words, they very much believe their own bullshit, and they are used to operating in a world where their bullshit was the only kind of bullshit available.

Therefore, the IC does not see any legitimate policy discussion and they don't think that anyone else sees it either, at least not anyone of any consequence. They see traitors trading in stolen property. From their perspective, the publication of this material harms "sources and methods" and therefore aids terrorism. They literally think that people like Snowden are criminally liable for aiding the enemy.

So, in their perspective, Miranda is not far removed from a terrorist. He is a "loony" radical that is engaged in actions that undermine their ability to fight terrorism, which is not so different from actually being a terrorist.

Furthermore, they believe that they have an unlimited power to detain anyone at a border crossing under any circumstance and go through that person's data. If this loony radical who is engaged in actions that enable terrorism is going to appear at a border, they would be remiss not to exercise their powers to detain that radical and get as much out of him as they can. From their perspective, its all part of an appropriate anti-terroism program.

There are four problems with this perspective.

The first is that there are real policy issues that have been raised by the Snowden revelations. This has been repeatedly pointed out by independent policy experts who are largely sympathetic to the interests of the IC, but the IC has their fingers planted firmly in their ears about this. They are simply blind to it, and that lack of awareness of their own fallibility is itself a part of the danger that they pose.

The second is that lots of people know that there are legitimate policy issues that have been raised by this. People are not as reliant as they used to be upon oped columnists in newspapers to tell them what to think. People have access to raw material here and they can make their own minds up. Washington is not used to having to contend with situations where people aren't falling in line with the messaging that they are putting out. They don't expect it.

The third problem is that in a context where the public has a right to know something, classifyin... [ Read More (0.4k in body) ]

RE: Greenwald's partner detained for carrying stolen classified docs

I can't stay online personally without losing my humanness, now that I know that ensuring privacy online is impossible.

Groklaw - Forced Exposure ~pj

State Department personnel then heard Kerry say, “Well, folks…Ever since the end of the Cold War, forces have been unleashed that were tampered down for centuries by dictators, and that was complicated further by this little thing called the internet and the ability of people everywhere to communicate instantaneously and to have more information coming at them in one day than most people can process in months or a year.”

Sec. of State John Kerry Bashes the Internet, Says it’s Harder to Govern People with Internet | The State Weekly

At a hearing in 2009, Senator Feingold stated: "I recall during the debate in 2005 that proponents of Section 215 argued that these authorities had never been misused. They cannot make that statement now. They have been misused. I cannot elaborate here. But I recommend that my colleagues seek more information in a classified setting." (at 105).

Documents Obtained by EFF Reveal FBI Patriot Act Abuses | Electronic Frontier Foundation

I have to say, this resonates, particularly the part about corporate lobbyists being protected from competition by the criminalization of recreational drugs and the use of surveillance to enforce that criminalization.

1. Misuse the concept of a Top Secret government document (say, the date of D-Day) and extend classification to trillions of mundane documents a year.

2. Classify all government crimes and violations of the Constitution as secret

3. Create a class of 4.5 million privileged individuals, many of them corporate employees, with access to classified documents but allege it is illegal for public to see leaked classified documents

4. Spy on the public in violation of the Constitution

5. Classify environmental activists as terrorists while allowing Big Coal and Big Oil to pollute and destroy the planet

6. Share info gained from NSA spying on public with DEA, FBI, local law enforcement to protect pharmaceuticals & liquor industry from competition from pot, or to protect polluters from activists

7. Falsify to judges and defense attorneys how allegedly incriminating info was discovered

8. Lie and deny to Congress you are spying on the public.

9. Criminalize the revelation of government crimes and spying as Espionage

10. Further criminalize whistleblowing as “Terrorism”, have compradors arrest innocent people, detain them, and confiscate personal effects with no cause or warrant (i.e. David Miranda, partner of Glenn Greenwald)

Greenwald Partner falsely detained as Terrorist: How to Create a Dictatorship | Informed Comment

Aside from the outrage over the treatment of a partner of a British newspaper’s employee, consider what it means that the UK used their terrorism law to detain Miranda (had he been transiting the US, they wouldn’t have needed to use the transparently false claim of terrorism — they can and do subject people to this treatment for no reason all the time).

America’s Closest Ally Declares Glenn Greenwald’s Partner a Terrorist | emptywheel